


Go Your Own Way

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Bill & Ted (Movies)
Genre: Daddy Issues, Explicit in later chapters, Gen, Gender Issues, Internalized Homophobia, Open Marriage, a fleetwood mac reference about not repeating the mistakes of our parents! that's MY america!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:27:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26170387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Ted's going to be different.
Relationships: Ted "Theodore" Logan/Bill S. Preston Esq.
Comments: 25
Kudos: 205





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I scribbled this down in fifteen minutes after having feelings about the new movie and Billie's cool, non-gendered style.

Billie cuts off all her long, curly hair when she’s thirteen.

It makes sense to Ted. He and Liz spent most of the 90s trying to comb out the majorly gnarly tangles within. Thea was way into copying elaborate braids and buns she’d seen women wearing on the covers of folk CDs, but his kid never seemed to share her cousin’s love for hair. If she had to do anything to it, it went in a bushy ponytail or tucked up in the righteous beanie from the thrift store.

So it’s not a most shocking turn of events when he finds her sitting cross-legged on the floor of the garage, safety scissors in hand, uneven dark clumps scattered in a half crescent around her. 

She dragged out an old Van Halen album, cranked it up on an even older record player to keep her company while she worked. “Runnin’ With the Devil” is playing so loudly she doesn’t realize he’s come in until he’s rolled up the garage door all the way to the top, letting sunlight flood the scene. 

Billie freezes, blades still up against her ear. It’d be easy to mistake her for a boy now, adding in her bare, round face. The longest strands barely reach her chin. His _own_ hair hasn’t been that short since he was sixteen. 

"Did I forget to bring you to the salon?" It's getting harder to keep track of Billie's appointments as she's gotten older. School, the doctor, the dentist, the music store, new clothes and shoes. His kid is rad, but sometimes he misses just putting her baby carrier on the coffee table while he worked on his song, the two of them jamming together all day. But Billie shook her head.

“Thea was going to help, but Aunt Jo made her to go home and clean her room,” she jerks her chin to the house next door. Her movements are stiff, almost robotic. “I think they'd say I did the back heinously short, but...” she clamped her mouth shut.

Sixteen. He used to lock up like that when he was sixteen, when Dad would corner him after school, grab him by the backpack strap and drag him into the living room to pick at his life choices. _Look at your hair, look at your clothes, look at your grades. What in God's name is the matter with you?_

“I just needed it all gone.” Billie says softly.

_Look at me, Ted. What the hell were you thinking?_

She thinks he’s going to yell at her. 

A tight, completely non-triumphant feeling takes hold in his chest.

“I dig the new look,” he says instead, sitting down on the ground next to her. Billie blinks. She’s got such big eyes, the surprise almost fills the room.

“Really?”

He nods, too hard, like a bobble-head. “Totally. It’s like, a send up to Bowie, or someone with British disco roots.”

Billie slowly lowers the hand gripping the scissors. “Like Sheena Easton?”

“Most definitely like Sheena Easton.” The record has switched from “Runnin' With the Devil” over to “Dance the Night Away”. His daughter’s shoulders drop an inch, then another. Her knuckles aren't so white.

“Dad? Can you get the back?” She jabs him in the leg with the sharp end of the scissors in the clumsy thrust to hand them over. 

“My pleasure, dude.” He presses gently on the back of her head, tipping her chin down. The snipping sounds loud in his ears, clear even above the pounding bass notes of Eddie Van Halen. Billie’s grin gets wider the more he cuts off. 

Ted’s going to be different at this dad gig.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey, guess who went down a rabbit hole!

When Ted is seventeen, he and Bill pierce his right ear in the garage, with a needle and an ice cube. It hurts so much he almost cracks his molars trying to grit through the pain.

The result looks totally excellent, a small gold hoop glinting in the light. For the first hour or so, at least, until it gets red and puffy and circled in pus. He ignores it for almost four days – grateful his long hair covers it – before he passes out in the middle of English and has to be walked by Bill to the nurse’s office. 

“Theodore, you have an infection,” she says, prying it out with completely terrifying metal pliers and leaving a scorching burn that made tears prick in his eyes. “You could’ve gone into septic shock if you left this in any longer.”

“Bogus,” Bill says, very gravely. 

Ted isn’t really sure what that means, other than he almost died for fashion. She cleans him up and gives him antibiotics to get the fever down, two in a series of events he deems awesome, and then calls his dad, a completely non-righteous third choice. 

“I’m fine, I can walk home,” he protests. She rolls her eyes.

“You think the school wants to deal with the paperwork if we let a minor walk out of here and then faint in oncoming traffic?” 

_Faint,_ like he’s some babe in a black-and-white movie. “I’m fine, dude,” he tries again, but the nurse just turns away to administer to a freshman girl having mondo period cramps. 

“Jesus Christ, Ted,” Captain Logan pinches the top of his fucked-up ear between his fingernails and lifts, tilting Ted’s head sideways so he can get a better look at the damage as they sit in the front seat of his squad car. “You’re lucky you didn’t end up in the hospital.”

“I know, sir,” he mumbles. He wishes Bill was in the car with them, still by his side, but the nurse shooed him back to English class, nearly over, when Ted’s dad showed up.

Captain Logan releases him and starts the car. Ted knows he should feel most exalted by this unexpected half-day, but his ear still hurts too much to care. “Of course Bill didn’t even put it on the right side.”

Ted blinks. Everyone thinks he’s so stupid, but he’s almost a full grown American man. He can tell his left from his right. “Yes he did, sir.”

His dad notches his confusion and sighs. “Right as in _correct_. The left side. You know what they say about men with pierced right ears, right?”

Ted feels the bridge of his nose, his cheekbones getting hot, because he does, he’s heard the jokes. _Left is right, right is wrong. Right ears are to let people know you're a faggot._ He knows that. 

He also knows Bill didn’t mess up. No, Ted was the one who offered this side of his head, this ear. That he bounced up and kissed Bill on the cheek as thanks when they were done, enjoying the way his best friend’s entire face went pink. 

He squirms in the passenger’s seat. “Oh, right.”

He can’t even listen to music when he gets home, so he just curls up on top of his covers and runs the pads of his fingers over his good ear, _the right ear, the correct ear, stop it, stop it,_ until the shape feels alien and smooth to the touch. He does it until he can’t remember what touching Bill’s face, what wanting to press his hand against his flat stomach, feels like.

He lets the hole scab over. Bill gets really into painting his nails black and offers to do Ted’s too. He always refuses with a smile – “Nah, it would be bogus to steal your look!” but feels a funny flutter in his stomach somewhere between excited and sick at the idea. He says the same when the princesses' chop up some of their clothes and sew together in new, most amazing configurations big enough to fit anyone, even him, if he wants them.

(He tells himself he doesn’t want them.)

He finds himself in bed with Elizabeth for the first time not much later, clutching fistfuls of her dark, springy hair, and he loves it. He really, totally does, and that must be proof he's not totally screwed up. Lying on his cramped twin mattress after, he wonders if it would feel as triumphant boning a dude. He passes off the flush in his face as heat of exertion.

Two years later, when Liz is scores a gig working part-time at the Claire’s in the mall, she uses a clean, bright gun to punch four new, neat holes in his ears – two on the right lobe, one on the left, one way up in the curve of the cartilage. 

“What happened here, darling?” She asks, thumbing the ugly scar where his first attempt didn’t heal right. He shrugged, that big grin coming out again.

“A stupid mistake.”

He leaves the earrings in this time. He’s a musician now, people don’t give him sideways looks very often, just wave it off as a side effect of the profession.

When they do, he tries to pretend it doesn’t bug in his stomach. Most of the time, that works. 

He pushes Bill up against the wall in a dingy basement club in Oakland and kisses him for what feels like an eternity but according to his semi-accurate watch was about nine seconds. Bill gives him a little smile with too-red lips when he pulls away and he hears himself apologizing. 

“I always wondered what it was like too, dude.” He says, “but Jo–”

Ted walks away from his best friend for the first time in recorded history. He sidles up to the bar and gets blackout drunk because he’s sick of feeling bad all the time. The alcohol makes him feel light and floaty, but not as much as kissing Bill did. He’s so wasted he trips over Joanna's kickdrum during the set and bashes his face on the corner of an amp. Bill piles them all into the van to the ER and the whole show is cancelled. 

He learns from a chain-smoking harpist in Encino that some people aren’t straight or faggots, but a place in the middle. This doesn’t make him feel better, just guiltier. He’s not crazy, stepping out on his girl for his best friend, he’s just a _jackass._

He picks fights and smiles less and pukes vodka all over the hotel room in San Bernardino and Liz wipes the sweat off his brow and tells him he needs to stop hurting himself like this or they’re not going to be able to go on. He asks her if a person could love a man and a woman in the same way. She wraps him in a hug on the floor and tells him all about the French courts she heard rumors of growing up and the wild and most bodacious orgies they threw, women with women, men with men, everyone with both, until he calms down a little.

They decide he’s going to stop drinking. He decides he's going to stop saying _faggot._

Billie is four and tugs at the studs or the little hoops in his ears whenever he picks her up. Billie is ten and loves playing dress up in his gold-macrame combat boots and neon button-ups, cuffed sleeves falling over her little hands. Billie is fifteen and shaves off what’s left of her hair. 

“Billie is totally punk rock,” he tells Liz when she gets home from work and sees her daughter looks like Sinead O’Connor. She just laughs. They both know that means _fearless._

Ted gets a weird pain behind his shoulder blades and realizes he's tensing to fight if someone looks at his kid in a bogus way. Nothing happens. His shoulders relax. He always was a pacifist anyway. Billie tells him that's most admirable, while they're coming up with weird handshakes and exploring the wonders that is the Indigo Girls discography.

”Way to buck the expectations of toxic heterosexual masculinity,” she says. 

He pauses, not sure if he should dwell on how most of those words don’t quite fit him. He swallows before it can come out his mouth. “Thanks, B.”

He finds he doesn’t care so much what he looks like anymore, either. Or more accurately, doesn’t care what other people think when they look at him, his hair, his clothes and jewelry. 

“This must be getting old, Bill my man,” he muses. His friend agrees, clinking his beer against Ted’s seltzer, thumb lingering on the knot of Ted's wrist. He and Liz talk about being married and how that doesn’t mean they can’t touch other people sometimes, as long as everybody knows the whole deal. 

Billie is eighteen and graduates high school with a C+ average (plus! _Plus!_ He’s never been so proud) and tells him, while Bill and Thea are across the supermarket to pick up balloons and they’re on cake duty, that she likes babes, not dudes. 

“Right on,” he says, fist bumping her as they wait in line at the bakery. It’s a testament to San Dimas, or maybe Southern California in general, that nobody on either side of them even blinks listening to this conversation. He and Bill must be on the right track with their song, if people are this chill about his daughter playing for the other team.

She beams and leans her head on his shoulder – she’s tall for a girl, almost too tall to pull off a move like that without hunching over – big eyes bouncing up to take in the side of his face. 

He wonders if it’s genetic, being...like that. Like them. If it was, an honorable dude – an honorable _father_ – would’ve told her years ago, so she was ready when it happened. So she wouldn’t be scared like him. If he was someone who wasn’t always gritting their teeth, just a little, behind that big smile. 

“Whoa, that’s a gnarly scar,” Billie says, flicking at his earlobe. He doesn’t have any piercing in today, so the white knotted skin that almost killed him is on full display. “What happened there?”

She doesn’t remember seeing it as a little girl, doesn’t remember her mother asking the same question. He wraps an arm around her shoulder as the line moves up.

“I let this dude I had the hots for try to pierce my ear in his garage," he admits.

And it’s out, sound waves in the air like any piece of beautiful music wafting through the world. Billie laughs, claps like a seal in her delight.

She’s _not_ scared of what she is, what _they_ are.

Growing up with Ted Logan as a father, she never had a chance to be.

“Oh, that’s supremely lame, Dad!"

There’s that light feeling again, something inside him that hasn’t relaxed since 1987 uncoiling. He made a house, a world, where his daughter feels _fine_.

“Thea!” Billie is suddenly on her cellphone, FaceTiming her cousin from across the store. “Dude, you have to see this butcher job Uncle Bill did on my dad’s ear when they were kids.”

“I never s–” The blush threatens to rise, but he just rolls his eyes and nudges her forward. “Go pick up your cake, B.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An interlude.

**_2001_ **

The thing about being married with a kid by the time you’re twenty-one is that you tend to be most lacking in the sex department.

He’s never slept with anyone but Elizabeth. Not for lack of trying in high school, but most babes were too popular or too married-to-Bill’s-dad to give him the time of day. There was no point in thinking about the boys he wanted either, not when there was no way in Hell (or Heaven) that he was ever going to act on it. And after he got married, moved into the house next to Bill and Jo, there seemed like no point in dwelling on it.

It’s just. Tonight Liz is on a date. With another dude.

Which he’s cool with. Totally. They talked about it, the rules of a modern California open marriage with a capital R. No details. No mushy love stuff. No doing the deed in their bed, in their house, Billie’s only five after all. 

“It will give us both a chance to explore, find out what we like, love,” she said. “Or things we like that we never got to try.”

He turned red and she kissed his cheek, laughing.

So it’s all good. He’s all good. He totally doesn’t feel empty. Waiting. Like an asteroid is about to hit and all he can do is sit there. 

Not that he _is_ just sitting there. He cleaned the entire house. He went on the computer, which he hates doing, to help print off some info for a project at B’s school. He kept the girls up watching a _Lion King_ VHS and eating Cheetos until they both passed out on the couch and had to be carried to his daughter’s room. He went to his studio to continue his quest to master the guitar lick in ‘Hot for Teacher’. 

And of course, Bill is there for all of it. Things would’ve gone bogus somewhere around the second rendition of “Hakuna Matata” if he hadn’t had Bill by his side. 

“How we feeling, dude?” He asks Ted, packing his new bass into its case. He’s grinning the way he does when he’s exhausted but trying to hide it, like acting hyped up will trick the rest of his body into following suit. He’s being most supportive.

They’ve talked about the whole open marriage sitch many, many times, at first because Bill didn’t really get it – _w_ _hen my mom started dating other dudes my dad just divorced her –_ then he kept mentioning that he and Jo had discussed the concept, for some reason. Then he just wanted to know if anything had happened yet, probably to be prepared for tonight, the very first time the answer was yes. 

It’s two AM. Liz must be spending the night with this dude, then. Which is Fine.

“Remind me I have to put those print-outs in Billie’s backpack,” Ted says, instead of answering. “Her education is most puzzling. Today she wanted to look up China.”

“Dude, it’s their class’s family tree project,” Bill says. Off Ted’s blank look, “ _Y_ _ou’re_ Chinese, ‘cause of your mom.”

“Oh, right.” He hasn’t seen her since he was ten and Deacon was five. Sometimes he forgets. What if Liz leaves? What if Billie forgets, like, what a British accent sounds like? His fingers pick at the smiley faces printed on the guitar strap. 

“We haven’t stayed up this late jamming in many years," he says, changing the subject. "We nourished ourselves with Circle K slushies mixed with every flavor.”

Bill’s smile softens then. He finishes packing and sits down on the beat-up orange couch right next to Ted, pushed up against the wall. “Suicides, right. I remember. A most impressive display of sugar.”

“Twenty-six might be a little old for those,” Ted says. He can’t seem to stop fussing with the strap. “I had the most heinous acid reflux the last time I had one at our show in Oakland."

"The one back in ‘93?" He nods. "Right,” Bill says, knee knocking against his. “The night you kissed me.”

Ted stops picking at the embroidery. He stops breathing. Bill’s knee is still touching his. 

They’ve never really talked about it, nearly ten years ago now. Ted’d been drinking a lot, angry a lot. At the world, but mostly at himself. The night ended in the emergency room and a loss of the $250 Wyld Stallyns would’ve earned had they actually finished their set, and everything else was sort of pushed to the wayside while they figured out how to get enough gas money to get to Reseda, let alone pay for Ted’s stitches. 

He had been so ashamed, tensed up for days waiting for someone – Jo, maybe even Bill – to punch him in the face, call him a loser, call him that word he hates. 

But of course Bill’s not mad. He never is. Maybe he can’t be, like scientifically there’s some chemical in his brain that keeps him–

His hand, heavy and warm, is on Ted’s thigh, now. 

Ted finally gathers the nerve to look up, and Bill’s eyes are heavy-lidded and dark in a way he’s never seen in the twenty-one years they’ve been best friends. 

His hand slides farther inward, palm on top of Ted’s crotch. Ever so slightly, he squeezes. Not an accident. An involuntary little exhale escapes out Ted’s nose. 

“Hey dude,” Bill says, and no matter how tired he is, that smile is sending more bolts of electricity through him than ever ran through the phone booth in the history of all time. _I always wondered what it was like too, dude._

No doing stuff in their house. This isn’t technically in their house, right? It’s the garage. And garages have always belonged to him and Bill.

“Hey,” he manages, and leans over to kiss him.

His fist wraps around a chunk of Bill’s curls. Kissing him feels like he’s nine and eighteen and twenty-six all at once, a singularity in time like Rufus used to talk about. 

It feels like light. 

Bill’s hand moves again, the heel of his palm rubbing harder against his cock. Ted can feel himself on the way to half-hard and further. His face is hot, and he breaks away, kisses his way down Bill’s jaw and neck until he can bury his face in his shoulder. It's an old red t-shirt, soft and smelling like him, the slight musk of too many hours awake, just so Ted didn’t have to be alone. 

“Dude?” Bill asks, shorthand in the inflection, _are you okay?_ His hand dips under Ted’s waistband, under his boxers. He nods into the crook of his neck, afraid to speak, let Bill hear how uneven his breathing is. His hand wraps around Ted’s cock and things go a little starry the first few strokes, Bill stumbling with the angles of an act he’s never done to another dude.

Heat is rising, up through Ted's stomach, into his chest. With one hand still in Bill’s hair, he indulges that old urge to find the hem of his shirt, slid a hand inside it to splay over Bill’s stomach, muscles taut. They’re so close, _he’s_ close in every way, he’s–

“ _Dads!_ ” A heinous sensation close to ice running through every vein overtakes his body, but Thea’s voice is far away, upstairs, inside. “ _Billie threw up, way too many Cheetos!_ ”

Ted lifts his head. Bill’s hand is still down his pants, their foreheads knocking together. He laughs, shuddering a little from overstimulation, because nothing else seems like the right move. 

“Coming, girls,” Bill calls, and that makes Ted laugh harder. “Shut _up_ , Ted!” 

He wipes his hand on his jeans and Ted tries to breathe, make his face look normal and not like he was interrupted mid jerk-off. His heart is beating out a drum solo in his chest when he thinks about how he had his hands and lips on someone else, someone male, not just someone but _Bill._ That shame he felt bleeding and drunk on the floor of a tour van surges back. When he makes a beeline towards the door, though, Bill catches his wrist.

“Hey,” there’s that smile again. “It’s just me, dude.”

He rocks onto the balls of his feet and kisses Ted again, softly. Ted wraps an arm around him, a hand on the small of his back, hooking his thumb through the belt loop on Bill’s jeans. Pulls him close, just for a minute. 

“Daaaa-aaads!” Thea is right outside now, more insistent.

Bill steps away and opens the door into the house, where the kids are standing in old Wyld Stallyns t-shirts everyone most generously calls pajamas. Billie's whole face is pale, except for the orange ring around her mouth. 

“Hey Theodora,” Bill hoisted her up on his hip. “Let’s go get B some water, okay?” 

Ted wipes off Billie’s mouth with his sleeve and settles her onto the couch.

“Where’s Mommy?” She yawns.

“She’s having an excellent exploration of her inner self,” he says. Billie nods, satisfied by this. 

“Is that why you look so happy?”

“What?”

“Daddy’s smiling like a crazy person,” she says, already half asleep again, assuming her cousin was back, listening to her every word. He lifted her into his lap, letting her use his chest as a pillow. 

Bill comes back with water and his own barely conscious kid. “Should we wake her up? Hydration is most important.” Of course he knows that. He’s the smartest dude Ted knows, and he thinks the two of them touching is a bodacious idea. 

“Nah, let them sleep.” 

Thea curls up against the arm of the couch, leaving Bill to lean against him again, hip-to-hip, shoulder to shoulder. “Ted?” he says, quietly. 

“Yes, Bill my friend?” Bill reaches down and laces their fingers together. A warm wave of pleasure runs through him, and now he can feel what Billie was talking about, a smile so wide it almost hurts. Growing sometimes hurts too. 

“To be continued."

Ted dares himself to kiss Bill’s cheek, and it’s easier than a few minutes ago, way easier than ten years ago, the world isn’t falling down, maybe this is how they _unite_ it. “Excellent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I see Keanu Reeves's white-passing and raise you "Ted is so white-passing and such a dope he himself forgot that he's not"


End file.
